


The Heart is a Star

by lilmoongodess



Category: Avengers
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-28
Updated: 2014-03-28
Packaged: 2018-01-17 09:10:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1381921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilmoongodess/pseuds/lilmoongodess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This is the partial story for tumblr user colonelrogers (royswordsman) and the beautiful art they made for the Stony (Superhusbands) Reverse Big Bang</p><p>this story is not finished. </p><p>the last sentence is not finished.</p><p>because i looked up from the screen into my driveway, and saw two state troopers who had come to tell me that my husband had been killed in a car accident an hour previously less than three miles from home.<br/>i was writing this when my husband of thirteen years died.</p><p>I will not finish this story.</p><p> I can't.</p><p>But if you out there, dear writers, feel that you wish to or that you can finish it, I would love to know it ends.</p></blockquote>





	The Heart is a Star

**Author's Note:**

  * For [colonelrogers](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=colonelrogers), [Royswordsman (RoySwordsman)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoySwordsman/gifts).



March 18, 2014- Monday. 8:34 P.M. Avengers Tower. Workshop of Tony Stark.

"Are you sure this is safe Tony?" Steve called out over the sound of whirring and whining gears and servos, powered with the incredible energy that fuled Tony's arc reactor. The dark-haired man in question was laying on a parody of a medical bed, arched and spread eagled as a machine limb manuvered over him, in the process of removing the device embedded in his chest. 

It sat clutched in the metallic claw-like fingers, glowing like a star.

"Steve, honey, i've done this a million times. Its just regular routine maintenance. JARVIS has me monitored and there's nothing to worry about." Tony's tone was patient and kind, though louder to speak to him over the noise. Steve understood Tony's confidence, being the genius that he was. He took a little comfort, okay a lot of comfort, in the casual endearment Tony just called him. Their relationship was still new, barely weeks old. And the discovery of their mutual feelings was a beautiful light, warm and tender inside him. Steve trusted Tony knew what he was doing, but a sense of unease and anxiety would not leave him. There was just something...wrong with Tony being laid so vulnerable, even to his own creations. He wished that he knew how to fix or touch the machine that kept Tony alive, so that Tony would have one more backup, one more failsafe. The grip on the couch cushion he'd been clinging to turned white and shredding with his nervousness. 

Oh if only he'd known.

A loud klaxon suddenly blared in the workshop and red lights flashed. JARVIS' usual calm british voice sounded concerned, 

"Sir, a power surge has occured in the manipulator arm, attempting to reroute and compenseate. Recommend replacement of the arc reactor immediately." The arm that was malfunctioning swayed and jerked, and Tony was shouting back at JARVIS. Steve was on his feet and across the room, already reaching for the reactor, to try and remove it by force from the machine's grip.

"No! Steve, wait! Its okay, I got this- I got this!" Tony yelled, barking out commands to JARVIS, trying to fix the machine as he lay with his heart outside his body. Steve watched as his skin began to sweat, going grey under the warning lights. The metal arm jerked and flailed abruptly, swinging towards Steve. In pure reflex, Steve seized the arm and held tight. "Steve! Let go! I got this! I got-" A loud crunch rent the air and the manipulator arm Steve held blazed crackling energy. The power shot through Steve and blasted him back into the worktable, knocking it over. 

Struggling upright, Steve got his bearings back and screamed at what he saw.

Tony was arched and screaming as the power surge tore through him. The manipulator arm's hand had crushed the arc reactor in its grip. It was bent and sparking and growing dim. Steve kept screaming and heedless of the power surge, ran forward and began tearing the machine apart, trying to get Tony free.

JARVIS was also shouting out words, but Steve could not hear them, could not listen. Tony was dying! He finally tore the last of the restraints and lifted Tony into his arms. 

But it was too late. 

The star had gone out.

Tony Stark was dead.

*******

March 17, 2024, 8:29 P.M. Monday. The Hidden City, Wakanda, Africa. Black Panther's laboratory.

The sounds of Tony's screams still woke him at night. Even ten years later. It could have been any number of person's screams, the war had been so brutal, but it was only Tony's that echoed in the hollows of his memory, torturing him with conjured accusations. If only Steve had been faster, if only he'd listened to his gut instinct. Tony might still be alive today. And if Tony was still alive, then maybe this god-awful hell that the world was currently in might never have happened.

Running a hand over his face, he didn't even pause to scratch the scarred flesh that twitched beneath his eyepatch. It was an old sensation now, and nothing, not even his super-soldier healing factor would fix it. Apparently the serum could not regenerate organs. 

Just as well, his eye had been a small pittance in the face of everything. Steve actually smiled grimly at the memory of how he'd lost it. He'd fallen asleep in Tony's workshop, days after his funeral, desperate for comfort in mourning his newfound love. Steve had not slept for days, and his exhaustion finally took him down hard. He hadn't even heard the sound of DUM-E's tracks as the machine had approached. It was only the pain that woke him, a cold searing pain that stabbed into his brain. 

Bleeding profusely and half blind, still in seconds with his strength, Steve had torn DUM-E apart, and the once-kind little bot had lain in pieces on the lab floor, Steve's burst eyeball clutched in its clawed hand. He'd had to run from the lab, as the other bots and JARVIS himself went on the offensive, lights flashing and screens scrolling dark red code that Steve knew 

Tony would understand. That Tony would know how to fix. But Tony was gone now. Tony wasn't there to fix it.

That's when it had all started. That's when the war began. 

JARVIS had gone mad and spread like a virus through every machine network on the North American continent, turning technology into a predator, hunting down and slaughtering humans in droves. Satellites had enabled JARVIS to spread into Europe and Asia, like a disease. Weapons and machines all came under JARVIS' control, turned on their makers with ruthless, detached efficiency. If it was two circuits and hooked into any sort of wire or wireless, JARVIS could reach it, control it. And kill with it.

From what they could glean from pieces of Tony's notes and tech that had been hastily stolen or hacked as they had fled, JARVIS was operating under some warped emergency protocol that Tony had been in the process of writing. It had only been half-finished, some sort of program that monitored and responded to threats to the core system. The core creators. Tony had meant it to help the Avengers, but without his guidance there to finish it, JARVIS had taken the protocols and twisted them into hunting down those that were percieved as threats to the core system. The core creator. Tony.

And Steve had been the one who was there when Tony died. Steve had torn the machines apart. 

Steve was the threat.

And vis a vis the twisted protocol, humans, all humans, were considered a threat, and must be nullified. In ten years, JARVIS had reduced the world's population by half. South America and most of Russia and China were smoking, nuclear wastelands. Australia was a burned out patch of dirt. North America and Europe were bound under an impentetratable technological net.

Only Africa remained largely untouched, and mainly because most of Africa was empty of technology. Here in the nation of Wakanda, millions of refugees had landed, seeking shelter in the last bastion of safe human technology. The superheroes, super humans, and mutants had come along with the normal humans, and each was crucial in the defense of Wakanda. They were under constant vigil, keeping missiles and ships and attacks at bay from the borders. Steve had set aside the shield, no longer able to bring himself to keep the title of Captain America, when America was effectively gone. He was only as good as he ever was as Captain, when Tony was beside him anyway. He joined the resistance, earned a rank that was largely a joke, but he cared little about that, too. It was only with the memory of Tony's life that Steve could find any sort of meaning as Colonel Rogers. The rest of his life was growing more and more meaningless as the world grew more desperate and dying around him.

So now he was here in the heart of the Hidden City, in King T'challa's stronghold, deep underground in a laboratory bunker, the greatest minds of the world (the ones that had managed to survive) had come together in a last-ditch attempt to end this war. And to end the war, they had given Steve the most cruel of tortures to endure. 

Hope.

Colonel Rogers paced like a caged animal through the lab. His skin felt too tight for his body, his mind was racing a mile a minute. He was so engrossed in his thoughts, that at first he did not notice the tap at his shoulder. The tapping came again, more forceful, and Colonel Rogers was pulled back into the present.

Turning, he saw the stretched limb of Dr. Reed Richards beckoning.

It was time.

Steve huffed a humorless laugh. Time. It was a cruel and vicious thing. It kept on going, careless of what it dragged along with it, how much it made people suffer. It kept pushing Steve farther and farther away from Tony. Steve was so weary of the war, so bitter with the world around him now. He clung to the memory of Tony's laughter, his smile. Steve had mourned for ten long, terrible years, but refused to let Tony go. Most normal, ordinary people would have said that it was crazy and harmful for Steve to do that. 

But Colonel Steve Rogers did not keep company with normal and ordinary people. And it was this crazy and harmful habit that they had told him would provide the key to the hope they offered him. Offered the world. 

Adjusting his uniform slightly, the white straps dingy with use and age, the dark blue faded and frayed at the edges, he marched over to the small knot of people gathered by a machine.

A machine. 

He huffed another laugh. 

Tony would have found it truly delightful, trusting their last hope to a machine.

The thought only comforted by the memory of Tony's laugh.

Colonel Rogers paid part of his mind to the attention of the instructions from the group before him. His mind would retain everything perfectly anyway, so it was only with cursory interest that he registered, "You will have 24 hours to get to the Zero Point." That came from Reed, who's head bobbed from a stretched neck.

"Once at the Zero Point, you must ensure that Tony Stark remains alive. He's the only one who can stop this before it starts." A soft, blue-furred voice and a strong hand on his shoulder, Hank McCoy. Colonel Rogers nodded. 

"You must ensure that Tony Stark lives, Steven. Keep your mind's will on him, his memory. It will help pull you towards him. Your fixation upon him has allowed him to become a fixed point in the timestream, something so intensely focused that it is possible for you to reach back to it. " A still-more quiet voice, wrapped in a long red cloak. Doctor Strange. His was the power that would power the machine. Of all energies available, JARVIS was unable to harness magical-based energy.

Another nod, another humorless huff. Tony had always hated magic.

"You must understand, also, Colonel Rogers," Reed's voice was detached and clinical, like it always was. Some things didn't change. How the man had withstood the death of his wife and children, as well as his team? "You will be unable to return to this time. If you are successful," He paused briefly, a wistful tone creeping into his voice, "you, us, this world...will cease to exist as a new timestream is written." Perhaps he wasn't as unaffected as Steve thought. 

"Understood." He said tersely. It was a relief to him to know that if he could do this, that the past ten years would be undone. It wasn't even that billions of lives would be saved. Somewhere inside, Steve was sure that he did care about that, but it wasn't billions of lives he wanted back. 

It was one.

And not his own.

"It is time." Doctor Strange said in his melodramatic way. That hadn't changed either. It was with a wry twist to his lips that Steve stepped between two pillars constructed in the middle of a small platform in the middle of the room. Symbols in long-dead languages crawled around them, curling up to the tops. Each pillar, which Steve saw now were obelisks, balanced a sphere at the point. One sphere was Earth, the other a celestial ball of stars, mapping out constellations. 

Steve really didn't care what they were or what they meant or what they did. Just as long as they did what they were supposed to. 

Sonorous chanting and whirling lights filled the room. Steve suddenly felt like he was squeezed from head to toe in some sort of invisible grip. It compressed tigher, and he lost his breath. The room warped around him and lights popped in the corners of his one-sided vision. The room warped further, bending into a modern art painting. The image made him smile.

And then he blacked out.

********

The first thing he noticed upon waking was the smell. It was fresh, clean and warm. There was no tinge of smoke or reek of flesh. He hadn't realized that the air he had been breathing for so long had been so...awful.

The second thing he noticed was that he was lying on a hard floor.

The third was, after he rolled upright, was that no less than twenty adamantium lances were pointed directly at him.

"Who are you?" Came a familiar voice. It was younger, less brittle than the one he had heard...well, heard less than a minute ago, but a minute ten waryears in the making. T'challa was standing before him, arms crossed, dressed in his full Black Panther regalia. Steve had been briefed about this, how to handle the past-selves of the people that had sent him back in time.

Steve made no move to stand, but merely held his hands out, palms up. "I am Colonel Steven G. Rogers, of the United Resistance, from the year 2024. Ten years from this precise date, T'challa. I am here to save a man's life and stop a war that will kill billions."

The Black Panther tilted his head and regarded him. He spoke in Wakandan then, giving Steve pause, but only for a heartbeat. Future T'challa had told him about this, about the secret passphrase that Wakandan kings gave only to their most trusted allies. 

Steve's mind, as serum-enhanced as it was, provided the reply instantly. He replied in perfect Wakandan: It was a reference to the massive asteroid that lay beneath Wakanda that was full of adamatium, Wakanda's prized treasure.

T'challa nodded, instantly accepting him. With another command, the lances were dismissed and a hand extended to help Steve to his feet.

"Tell me." The dark king said. 

And Steve began to speak.

******

It took less time than Steve thought it would to completely convince the past-selves of his comrades to help him. T'Challa's voucher was definitely in his favor on that point. They were all on teleconference now as T'challa's royal jet flew across the Atlantic, heading for New York. Hank McCoy had not asked for verification at all, Doctor Strange had merely held up his hand and flared in magic, nodding his acceptance. Reed had not shut up at all, asking for every single detail Steve could recall regarding the nature of the rouge JARVIS program, the machine that sent him back in time, the details of his mission, and the "projected effects of a causality being collapsed before it had a chance to coalesce." Steve raised an eyebrow on that one, which actually lifted his eyepatch. Hank had waved Reed off and they began bringing up the point that Steve was now...breathlessly anticipating. 

And it seemed that this point was the one that would cause the problems for Steve. He thought it had all gone too easily so far.

The scientists argued over Tony.

Should Tony be told? Should Steve be allowed to see him? What if something happened and Steve could not prevent the accident that caused Tony's death? Wouldn't it be better to send Hank and Doctor Strange to prevent it, to watch over the procedure, as doctors and healers? What would Tony do in reaction to this? How would it affect the current timestream?

Steve ate another roast beef sandwich (God he had missed fresh food) and let the argument wash over him. He really didn't care what they thought or what they thought he should do. He knew what he was going to do. He bit into an apple (a fresh grown apple, not dehydrated foodstuffs stolen from military rations) and smiled. Hope was blossoming inside him as it hadn't done since the moment he'd confessed his feelings for Tony and had them returned. 

He was going to save Tony. 

The argument was distant in his ears as he let himself imagine Tony, for the first time clearly in years. It had hurt too much to think on him until now. Now he closed his eyes and pictured his handsome lover. Oh yes, they were lovers, or ...they were going to be. Before the accident. They had only shared kisses and touches, Tony insisting on going slow to meet some sort of cockamamy idea that Steve needed the old-fashioned courting speed. Steve disagreed, but he had followed Tony's lead. Tony's kisses had been heaven, and in the handful of times Steve had sought some sort of relief in his own hand, the memory of Tony's mouth and his warmth were bright in his mind as he had climaxed. He ached for more now, and indulged in a fantasy of them together, naked in bed, warm and sated and...

His sudden erection jarred him awake and he quickly crossed his legs, willing it to go down. He'd drifted off into an erotic dream. Reluctant to leave it, but knowing he'd see the real Tony soon enough, Steve stretched and asked if there was any more sandwiches. 

They were less than two hours away from New York. The travel time had eaten more than ten of his allotted 24 hours. T'challa and the others had pressed relentlessly on this point, on his countdown. Steve recited as much as he could of the science involved, reeling it off by rote instead of by understanding. This sparked yet more heated discussions between the scientists. 

Still, Steve did not care. The time ticked down. As they approached JFK airport, Steve caught a glimpse of Avengers Tower, still standing proud and gleaming in downtown Manhattan, between the Chrysler and the Empire. It caused his chest to seize up, and he struggled to breathe through a hot burst of sorrow. He'd walled it away for years, never really dealing with the death of so many he had cared for. It threatened to break through now, but Steve mortared up the cracks with hope. Hope that he could save one man, and thereby save them all.

When they landed, Steve and T'challa were met by the others. Doctor Strange hummed and let a magical

**Author's Note:**

> This is the partial story for tumblr user colonelrogers (royswordsman) and the beautiful art they made for the Stony (Superhusbands) Reverse Big Bang
> 
> this story is not finished. 
> 
> the last sentence is not finished.
> 
> because i looked up from the screen into my driveway, and saw two state troopers who had come to tell me that my husband had been killed in a car accident an hour previously less than three miles from home.  
> i was writing this when my husband of thirteen years died.
> 
> I will not finish this story.
> 
> I can't.
> 
> But if you out there, dear writers, feel that you wish to or that you can finish it, I would love to know it ends.


End file.
